Just because I wasn't a first-person witness to the start of ARPANET in 1969 or the early years of the newsgroups doesn't mean that I can't be an accurate witness to the newsgroups or the internet when I encountered them in 1991, which was at least 6 months before the web starting having any significant influence on the internet.

In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET.

I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future.

I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers?

E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?

"Just because ... I can't be ..." [strawman] -- of course it doesn't mean you can't be ... you simply weren't.

"In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET."

What "it"? Again, the ARPANET and the Internet are (were, since the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990) different things.

The Internet is called that because it was formed from interconnected networks, one of which was the ARPANET. The ARPANET did not become the Internet in 1983, it simply adopted the protocols that would later be the basis of the entire Internet.

This isn't worth pursuing further.